Hurdles to Making Money from Content

[viralvideowall]

Back in the good ol' days it was pretty easy to churn out a web site and make money from it with Adsense or whatever.

Now it seems like there are a million obstacles... or is it just me? :)

Here's a few I can think of...

The Good Ol' Days:

HTML editor
Niche
Domain name
Content
Margaritas

The Over Saturated/Crappy Economy Days

A good idea
Ideal stealers
A good domain name
Content management system
Web site security
Never ending content creation (must be "original" whatever that means)
DMCA's and Cease & Desist letters
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, G+
Email newsletter
SEO
Webmaster tools
RSS
Sitemaps
Backlinks
Competing with Huffington Post and other big corporations
Adsense bans
Google slaps
Panda
Ulcers

It seems to me that content creation business is all going towards the big corporations overall. Would Google rather manage a few high profile sites owned by companies with big bank accounts... or deal with a million "losers"? Judging by how often The Huffington Post shows up in the Google results I'd say the little guy's days are numbered.

What do you think? :)

[Musicarl]

Yeah, we're going to see fewer mom and pop websites getting significant rankings in the content area. Now that just about every topic is covered on Wikipedia, you better have something special to say or something to differentiate your pages, and also some help sorting out the issues you mentioned.

As you pointed out, being a webmaster has become much more complicated and it's a moving target. Gone are the days when an astronomer can get a copy of Dreamweaver and put up a site about the solar system that gets Google love. Now that same guy might write for the Huffington Post.

[onepointone]

Now that just about every topic is covered on Wikipedia, you better have something special to say or something to differentiate your pages

To some extent, it doesn't matter what you do to differentiate yourself.

I see inferior wikipedia pages ranking 1st or 2nd for so many music, biography, art, type searches I do. Above whole websites devoted to the topic, official band websites, etc.

And then there's Amazon. Of course they have products related to every topic, etc.

Of course the good stuff can still be found, you just have to look harder.

[wheel]

I don't think wikipedia will be forever. I remember when they didn't rank, I'll remember when they did. Anyone else remember DMOZ?

The day Google decides that wikipedia ranking is no longer beneficial for Google, well, that'll be a bad day for wikipedia.

[viralvideowall]

Very true that this is a moving target.. and if you are getting older, have kids having to compete with new developers that are much younger and have tons of energy and minimal obligations adds a whole new level of difficulty.

It's sort of like how a Hollywood star can be on top of the world for a few years, making movies every year. But once she hits the wall, she probably won't land a job

[graeme_p]

@wheel, I think you are probably right, but Google are taking their time about it.

Even worse, other search engines do things like offering Wikipedia searches, or promoting wikipedia results.